Download e-book for kindle: Figures of Simplicity: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and by Birgit Mara Kaiser

A interesting comparability of the paintings of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Figures of Simplicity explores a different constellation of figures from philosophy and literature—Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—in an try and recuperate substitute conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of considering misplaced within the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. this is often performed essentially by means of tracing a number of “simpletons” that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. those figures will not be fullyyt ignorant, or silly, yet easy. Their simplicity is a manner of pondering; one who writer Birgit Mara Kaiser the following indicates is affective considering. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting of their texts with an affective mode of pondering, and thereby proceed, she argues, a key line inside of eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. via her analyses, she deals an overview of what pondering can appear like if we take affectivity into account.

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht college within the Netherlands.

This 2002 quantity brings jointly significant works via German thinkers, writing simply sooner than and after Kant, who have been drastically influential during this an important interval of aesthetics. those texts comprise the 1st translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's at the inventive Imitation of the attractive, including translations of a few of Hölderlin's most vital theoretical writings and works through Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical creation J. M. Bernstein lines the improvement of aesthetics from its nonetheless rationalist and mimetic development in Lessing, throughout the positive construal of artwork and/or attractiveness because the visual appeal of human freedom within the paintings of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker imaginative and prescient of artwork because the reminiscence of a misplaced solidarity, and the differences of that subject matter - of an most unlikely striving after the misplaced perfect - that are present in the paintings of Schlegel and Novalis.

First released in 1548, at the great thing about ladies purports to checklist conversations shared by means of a tender gentleman, Celso, and 4 girls of the higher bourgeoisie within the neighborhood of Florence. One afternoon Celso and the women ponder common good looks. On a next night, they try and model a composite photo of excellent good looks via combining the attractive gains of girls they understand.

How does a reader reply to a piece of literature and the way does he start to overview it? Mr Olsen makes an attempt to reply to those and comparable questions. The publication is in components. within the first 3 chapters, the writer demolishes validated theories that literature has a distinct language, offers a heightened perception into 'truth' and has emotion as its major foreign money.

Texture represents the newest improve in cognitive poetics. This publication builds feeling and embodied adventure directly to the insights into meaningfulness which the cognitive method of literature has completed lately. Taking key general suggestions equivalent to characterisation, tone, empathy, and identity, the publication goals to explain the typical event of literary analyzing in a radical and principled means.

Additional info for Figures of Simplicity: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)

Example text

Such is the reason behind his claim that ‘prophecy’ and understanding the past as necessary ‘are altogether identical’. e. according to necessary laws). Moreover, and this is the crucial point, Climacus employs the same line of reasoning on the past: we cannot understand the past as necessary, for the past is merely one out of many equally possible pasts that could occur. Therefore, we are now able to take a step back to reflect on Climacus’ argument so far. This argument, we have seen, constitutes an answer to the ontological question of history: the nature of history is to be conceived exclusively as the history of human beings and so must be directly connected with ‘freedom’.

Past and present are human actualities while human future is human possibility. And so to redefine the present in the light of the past and the future is the distinguishing mark of a properly human freedom. Howland makes a similar point in regard to Climacus’ argument in the ‘Interlude’: ‘[O]nly human beings are self-consciously historical, continually redefining themselves in terms of their actual pasts and possible futures. ’22 However, missing from Howland’s account are the following elements: (a) human freedom is mainly oriented towards future decisions and (b) human freedom is a matter of human will (and so of human ability to make decisions).

For example, Robert C. ’3 Jacob Howland argues that ‘[C]limacus’s general aim is clear: he wants to safeguard faith from the tyranny of philosophical reason ... 5 What all these commentators share, despite all their ultimately divergent interpretations, is the contention that the ‘Interlude’ contains Kierkegaard’s concept of history in nuce. Kierkegaard’s Concept of History 29 However, this is where agreement ends, for each of these commentators diverge considerably both in what they understand Kierkegaard’s concept of history to be and in their evaluation of how cogent Kierkegaard’s argument is.